smartphone apps for field biologists

This list is one of the products put together by students in the 2011 edition of my graduate course in Plant-Animal Interactions. As part of the class, my students developed a guide to the native tree species of the University of Florida campus, with information on the their dispersers, pollinators, and herbivores (you can download it here for your Android smartphone). The students also wrote a paper in the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America describing the process and laying out some of the ways smartphones can be used in ecological research, teaching, and extension).

If you are a developer and would like to add your app to the list, or you have an application you like to use but it isn’t here, please send me an email with a link to the apps home page. H/T to Elena Malykhina for her article highlighting several citizen science apps that were new to us.

DarkSkyMeter: Estimate the brightness of the night sky with Iphone camera

Field Guides

Plant-o-Matic: The BIEN Plant-O-Matic generates a list of plant species at 100 sq. km resolution for any location in the Americas. Pictures and information help you identify and learn about each species. [Editor’s note 22 august 14: this sounds awesome, can’t wait to try it].

Mapping, GIS, & GPS

Nokia Maps: independent of a data signal (maps preload) and provides voice navigation, tilt and night views, 3D cities, and numerous gps-enhanced services as well as syncing with their full program on a PC

MeasureMap: lets you draw polygons on a hybrid Google map, save the polygons, and export as KML, CSV, PNG, MMP (proprietary format), and PDF. (h/t EarthKnight who has a nice post describing apps used in his fieldwork)

Multiconvert: conversion of units. 100s of units (weight, distance, you name it).

Pocket LAI – smartphone app for estimating Leaf-Area Index: Read about it here (presentation) and here (journal article). It is €35 for public institutes and students/€70 euros for private companies and currently available for Android, with iOS version available in spring 2015. For more information or to purchase contact: cassandra.lab@unimi.it.

Citizen Science

Project Budburst: national field campaign designed to engage the public in the collection of data on timing of leafing, flowering, and fruiting of plants

Urubu Mobile: Developed by Brazil’s Federal University in Lavras’ Center for The Study of Road Ecology (UFLA/CBEE) this cool app is used to register animal roadkill to study and mitigate the impacts of roads (read more here and here). Available for download for Android phones here. PS “Urubu” is “vulture”in Portuguese…typical Brazilian sense of humor!

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[…] (recording where precisely the species of interest are found). We have considered the use of existing web apps as well as particular programs, and data collection could be by a combination of skilled surveyors […]

[…] The Bruno Lab has a nice series of recommendation for SmartPhone Apps for the Field Ecologists. Increasingly we find ourselves relying on our phone apps for not only data entry but also natural history, note taking, recording, remembering key must have/to do items etc. I was about to write a post about this but this lab link covers most of what the lab uses. […]

[…] on Ipads to enter data. There are many, many, many data collection applications out there (see http://brunalab.org/apps/ for a great list) and expensive programs designed for research collection (e.g. Observer by […]